Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Place du jour, September 29th, 2023 – September 29th, 2025, set of 24 paper posters, rue Braque, Arras/FR. 

Place du jour is a project by Pierre-Olivier Arnaud. It is part of a program launched by the CNAP in 2019 to commission temporary, reactivatable works for public spaces.

The artist presents a two-year billboard display on rue Braque, in Arras: each month a new image replaces the one from the previous month. This rotation on five panels features a total of 24 black-and-white photographs. Pierre-Olivier Arnaud works meticulously on his pictures, in particular their texture, and plays on the contrast with the simplicity and fragility of paper. His artistic approach is characterized by great spontaneity: he captures, immortalizes, and sublimates the objects he encounters on his travels.

This project was conceived in and for the urban space to propose a radical and democratic art form, accessible to the public outside institutional cultural spaces. At the end of the display cycles, a newspaper containing all these images will be printed and distributed to the city’s residents.

With Place du jour, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud invites us to reconsider the images we encounter in public spaces, often used for advertising or electoral purposes. By hijacking this tool of communication and influence, the artist transforms the poster into an artistic medium, exploring the aesthetic qualities that emerge from its fragility, ephemeral nature, and inevitable deterioration.

 

Michel Blazy, La Cantine, artistic commission as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires initiative, 2024. Photo : Centre International d’Art et du Paysage – Île de Vassivière
Clément Villiers, Réfectoire, film, 24 minutes, 2024 © Clément Villers

The former Chamet vacation center in Faux-la-Montagne, Creuse, France, has been abandoned since the late 2000s.
In 2018, it was taken over by a group of independent researchers who set up create and build a place for research and study.
In 2019, the group calls on CIAPV to accompany them in the commissioning of a work that questions the takeover of civilizational sites by new forms of life.

Chosen to respond to this commission, artist Michel Blazy is developing La Cantine, a garden of anticipation in the site’s former refectory. He treats the ruin as a living being in its own time, observing its movements and exchanges with other species. It becomes a new nurturing environment without human domination, a space of symbiosis and reconciliation between artifact and organic, between human, plant and animal.

Commissioned as part of the Nouveaux commanditaires program,
Lac du Chamet, Plateau de Millevaches.
Sponsors: Center for Forest Research and Study.
With the support of Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso Foundation, the Fondation de France and the volunteers who participated in the production of the work.